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I was actually trying to defend the Buddhists. Victor was implying by saying that the Buddhists are killing Tamils, that the Sinhalese were killing the Tamils randomly for Buddhism sake. Which is not true.

That was the point I was trying to make.

W.B. Bandarnakaye saw the waning of the Sinhalese language in Sri Lanka and enacted the Sinhala only act of 1956.

Buddhism may or may not have been a factor in this, but this was the first major chavunistic ideal of the Sri Lankan Government

[QUOTE=Curzon;976548]The Tamils wanted their own nation called Ealam which is 1/3 the size of Sri Lanka.
And the Sinhalese didn't want to give them a separate country in Sri Lanka.

You do happen to realize that there was no Sri Lanka before the British right? Sri Lanka had existed as Two kingdoms the Jaffna kindgdom ruled by Tamils and the Kandy Kingdom ruled by the Sinhalese. Which were relatively peaceful towards each other and marred by a few conflicts. The British just united the whole country together for an easier administration irrespective of race or religion... like they did in every single other place. The Tamils asked for equal rights or their Tamil kingdom.

So the Tamils started a war. Killed 13 soldiers to prove a point. And a war broke out.

Seriously? I do want to know your sources for these.

This was actually the real cause, most people (Both Tamil and Sinhalese) wanted a unified strong Sri Lanka until Bandarnayake passed the Sinhala Only Act.

Following independence in 1948, G. G. Ponnambalam and the party he founded, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (Tamil Congress), joined D. S. Senanayake's moderate,[citation needed] Western-oriented, United National Party Government. This Government pass the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, which denied citizenship to Sri Lankans of Indian origin and resulted in Sri Lanka becoming a majoritanian state. Sri Lanka's government represented only the majority community, the Sinhalese community,[citation needed] and had marginalized the minorities, causing a "severe degree of alienation" among the minority communities.[9]

When this Act was passed, the Tamil Congress was strongly criticized by the opposition Marxist groups and the newly formed Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist Federal Party (FP). S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the leader of this new party, contested the citizenship act before the Supreme Court, and then in the Privy council in England, on grounds of discrimination towards minorities, but he did not prevail in overturning the act.

The FP took two seats in the 1952 election, against the Tamil Congress' four, but in the 1956 election it became the dominant party in the Tamil districts and remained so for two decades. The FP's came to be known for its uncompromising stand on Tamil rights.[10] In response to the parliamentary act that made Sinhala the sole official language in 1956, Federal MPs staged a non violent sit in (satyagraha) protest, but it was broken up by a nationalist mob. The police and other state authorities present at the location failed to take action to stop the violence. The FP was cast as scapegoats and were briefly banned after the 1958 riots in which many were killed and thousands of Tamils forced to flee their homes.

Another point of conflict between the communities was state sponsored colonization schemes that had the effect of changing the demographic balance in the Eastern province in favor of majority Sinhalese that the Tamil nationalists considered to be their traditional homeland. It has been perhaps the most immediate cause of inter-communal violence.[11]

In the 1970s importing Tamil language films, books, magazines, journals, etc. from the cultural hub of Tamil Nadu, India was banned. Sri Lanka also banned local groups affiliated with groups such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham and the Tamil Youth League. Foreign exchange for the long established practice of Tamil students going to India for university education was stopped. Equally, examinations for external degrees from the University of London were abolished. This had the effect of culturally cutting off the links between Tamil Sri Lankan and Tamils from India. The then government insisted that these measures were part of a general program of economic self-sufficiency as part of its socialist agenda and not targeted against the Tamil minority.

In 1973 the policy of standardization was implemented by the Sri Lankan government to what they believed was to rectify disparities created in university enrollment in Sri Lanka under British colonial rule. It was in essence an affirmative action scheme to assist geographically disadvantaged students to gain tertiary education. The resultant benefits enjoyed by Sinhalese students also meant a significant fall in the number of Tamil students within the Sri Lankan university student populace.[12]

In 1973, the Federal Party decide to demand for a separate state. To further their nationalistic cause they merged with the other Tamil political parties to become the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in 1975. On 1976, after the first National convention of the Tamil United Liberation Front, the Ceylon Tamils moved towards a morphed nationalism which meant that they were now unwilling to live within a confined single island entity[13]. Chelvanayakam and the Federal Party had always campaigned for a unitary country and thought that partitioning of the country would be “suicidal” up until 1973. However policies by the various governments that was considered to be discriminatory by Tamil leadership[11] modified the stand to Tamil Nationalism.

Unfortunately for the Sri Lankan Sinhalese the Indian government started training and arming the Tamils Tigers. The Raw (research and analysis wing) is the brain child of the Tamil rebel movement. That is why it became so powerful. They had the backing of India.

Since -
India >>>> Sri Lanka

So the Tamil rebel movement thrived........

Yes the RAW did fund the LTTE initially but you seem to forget all that funding stopped after the IPKF mission/Rajiv Gandhi assasination. After this, the Indian parliament began funding the Government of Sri Lanka and thus according to that logic they should have been severely weakened destroyed in around 1992/3.

But they weren't defeated until this year. 16 years after India withdrew its support and started funding Sri Lanka and due to the US Government started funding any country that was declaring war on a so called Terrorist Organization. Not to mention the millions of dollars the Chinese have given them for the naval base in Hambatonga (this is spelt incorrectly I know.)

Whereas Hitler managed to kill about ten million of his own people over about seven years, the marxists, led by Stalin and Mao managed to kill about one hundred million of their own people over seventy years.

And it is important to remember that it was not the enemy they killed but their own people who were helpless and dependent on them.

Stalin notched up about twenty million, but Mao topped them all with about eighty million.

And for those of you who would like to read the documentation and the exact figurers, you can find them in, "The Black Book of Communism", written and collated by a group of left-wing French historians.

So it is the marxist Mao who is the world's greatest mass murderer.

Does this matter today?

Yes, because today the Marxists have joined the Islamists in their jihad of murder, intimidation and propaganda.

That was more a function of the state funding structure's design funneling wealth to the first and second estates, depriving a potential bourgeoisie of capital investments, wasn't it?

Not only.

It's also a question of cultural philosphy. The English bourgeoisie was the first to harshly exploit their fellow man, environment and ressources, and feels absolutely no guilt or remorses about it (protestant-anglican ethics). England has always been a very anti-egalitarian society. It would thrive under extreme conditions of poverty that would have never been considered as "sustainable" everywhere else in continental Europe.

No wonder so many emigrants wanted to flee England and the British Isles during those centuries. It was an hellish place to be.

France's society was a real paradise compared to it, so no wonder that despite its huge manpower and occasional political turmoil, there were so few French families that tried to emigrate and settle in the "New World".

"A man who only drinks water has a secret to hide from his fellow-men" -Baudelaire

It's also a question of cultural philosphy. The English bourgeoisie was the first to harshly exploit their fellow man, environment and ressources, and feels absolutely no guilt or remorses about it (protestant-anglican ethics). England has always been a very anti-egalitarian society. It would thrive under extreme conditions of poverty that would have never been considered as "sustainable" everywhere else in continental Europe.

No wonder so many emigrants wanted to flee England and the British Isles during those centuries. It was an hellish place to be.

France's society was a real paradise compared to it, so no wonder that despite its huge manpower and occasional political turmoil, there were so few French families that tried to emigrate and settle in the "New World".

Unless you were a Huguenot. At least in England, the religious minority (Puritans) was able to secure a sense of freedom of religion, by chopping off the head of the king.

Contemporary French Catholicism didn't promote capitalist exploitation because of some greater sense of noblesse oblige toward the serfs. I'd say it was rather the conservative vestiges of feudalism - you didn't exploit others because everyone had their God-ordained places in society, and the relationships of giving and taking were already established. In Great Britain, these concepts were obliterated by first the Reformation (which generally didn't change much), but much more importantly the English Civil War, which implanted in their society that beyond simply their estate, being an Englishman meant something in and of itself. It was this same concept which led to the American Revolution, and when the same idea arose in France, led to the rise of Napoleon, who knew how to express this concept magnificently.

It's also a question of cultural philosphy. The English bourgeoisie was the first to harshly exploit their fellow man, environment and ressources, and feels absolutely no guilt or remorses about it (protestant-anglican ethics). England has always been a very anti-egalitarian society. It would thrive under extreme conditions of poverty that would have never been considered as "sustainable" everywhere else in continental Europe.

No wonder so many emigrants wanted to flee England and the British Isles during those centuries. It was an hellish place to be.

France's society was a real paradise compared to it, so no wonder that despite its huge manpower and occasional political turmoil, there were so few French families that tried to emigrate and settle in the "New World".